Friedrich E.P. Hirzebruch (born
17 October 1927) is a German mathematician, working in the fields of
topology, complex manifolds and
algebraic geometry, and a leading figure in his generation.
He was born in
Hamm, Westphalia. He studied at the
University of Münster from 1945-1950, with one year at
ETH Zürich. He then had a position at
Erlangen, followed by the years 1952-54 at the
Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, New Jersey. After one year at
Princeton University 1955-56, he was made a professor at the
University of Bonn, where he remained, becoming director of the
Max-Planck-Institut für Mathematik in 1981. More than 300 people participated in the event in ceremony of his 80th birthday at Bonn in 2007.
The
Hirzebruch-Riemann-Roch theorem (1954) for complex manifolds was a major advance and quickly became part of the mainstream developments around the classical
Riemann-Roch theorem; it was also a precursor of the
Atiyah-Singer index theorem. Hirzebruch's book
Neue topologische Methoden in der algebraischen Geometrie (1956) was a basic text for the 'new methods' of
sheaf theory, in
complex algebraic geometry. He went on to write the foundational papers on topological
K-theory with
Michael Atiyah, and collaborate with
Armand Borel on the theory of
characteristic classes. In his later work he provided a detailed theory of
Hilbert modular surfaces, working with
Don Zagier.
He was awarded a
Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 1988, a
Lobachevsky Medal in 1989, and the
Cantor medal in 2004 amongst many other honours. He is also a foreign member of numerous academies and societies, including the
United States National Academy of Sciences, the
Russian Academy of Sciences,
and the
French Academy of Sciences. In 1980/81 he delivered
the first
Sackler Distinguished Lecture in Israel.
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